K-SCORE: 15
Director: Paul Middleditch
Writer: Chris Matheson
Starring: Anna Kendrick, Craig Robertson, Ken Jeong, Rob Corddry
Spoiler Level: Minor
Instead of drafting an entire plot, the filmmakers clearly just decided on a bunch of things they thought would be funny and filmed them. I’m not sure there was ever a real script, just a table meeting where people said things like, “Alright, Anna Kendrick is going to be the hot angel character, obviously. She’ll have a nerdy boyfriend. Ooh, Craig Robertson can be satan, but we’ll call him, like, ‘The Beast’ so it’s a little less obvious. What else? What else? Crows that scream obscenities at people. Alright, that’s enough. Let’s start rolling the cameras.”
These no accountability comedies are getting more and more boring. Any jokes that don’t land make you cringe, coming across as desperate and pointless. I can’t really tell if it’s mocking the notion of The Rapture or not. Taking a lukewarm stance on the primary subject matter isn’t a good quality in absurdist fiction. For all that though, Rapture-Palooza very occasionally funny, which just makes it all the sadder that no one who made it seemed to care very much about it. So why should I?